Chinese School

[This is a follow on from the previous post.]

My battle with the Chinese language started when I was quite young. When I first started Chinese school in Redfern I was only 4 years old. The usual homework for Chinese school is for the teacher to write one word at the top of the page and for the students to copy it out in the boxes again and again until the bottom of the page. As a 4 year old, the words just looked like scribbles to me. So I just scribbled inside the boxes, and even got the girl from next door to help me 'do my homework'. My parents wanted to take me out of the class after that, but the teacher was a family friend who wanted to keep me for the novelty factor. I don't recall who won in the end.

The next school was in Milsons Point and the only thing I remember about this school is watching Monkey Magic while waiting for the classrooms to become free. I don't remember what the problem was - maybe there was another language school there before us. My mother taught at this school for a while and my sister and the two daughters of my mother's friend were in her class. The friend's kids couldn't actually speak any Chinese because their mother spoke to them in English all the time, so I never quite understood why I was in a lower class than them.

My parents must've thought my Chinese was really bad because at the next school in Chatswood, they put me in the absolute beginners class. I was bored to tears repeating 'yi, er, san' over and over in unison with the other students (who were all heaps younger than me). Now you might understand why I have an aversion to Chinese-style teaching. Just repeating in unison over and over again and copying things out over and over again doesn't sit well with me. To make matters worse the teacher was a friend of my parents and kept referring to me personally until I wanted to sink into the floor and disappear. Fortunately I was about 9.5 years old by then and conscious enough of my situation to make a huge complaint to my parents as soon as class was over. My sister told them to put me in her class, which was something like M1. I think there were 3 beginners levels and then the middle levels, hence the M.

Sitting at our table were 2 other girls, one called Lisa-May, who was from a Cantonese speaking family and 2 years younger than me, and Jane, a white girl 2 years older than my sister. She said she wanted to learn Cantonese because she had a lot of Cantonese speaking friends at school, but there weren't any classes. Jane was serious about the classes but all I remember is messing about and making fun of the teacher. I even still have the textbook in which I kept tally of certain English phrases the teacher used like 'and then', 'break time' with her strong Chinese accent. I feel really sorry now! Lisa-May was also really young and not really interested in learning. We started having this lucky dip thing where we'd bring some things and let the other person pick something out. We played around with the lucky dip and talked all through class. I only recall learning one single word during that entire year!

After one year in Chatswood the school moved to Eastwood and my parents thought we might as well go to Stanmore where most of their friends sent their kids. The Chatswood one taught pinyin and simplified Chinese, while the Stanmore one taught the Taiwanese version, which my parents know. They put me in level 2 and my sister in level 4. I don't know what it was, but here I was forced to learn! I don't know if just the school was more strict, whether I was just older and more aware, or whether my parents paid more attention because they were more involved with the school. I actually learnt something in my first year here. Things went downhill for a while after that because I didn't like some of the teachers. They're all volunteers without teaching qualifications! I couldn't stand some of their teaching methods and the older I got, the more critical I got. I think when I was in year 7 or 8 at 'normal' school, the teacher said that everyone would have to give a speech at the end of year concert. HELLO?! What happened to freedom of choice? I guess that's something that Chinese teachers don't understand. At the concert, when it was speech time, I told my parents I had to go to the toilet and hid outside until the speeches were over. My dad later asked me 'Why were they calling your name?' and I just shrugged while trying hard not to laugh!!

Because I was way behind and practically learning disabled at Chinese , at Stanmore I was put into a class with kids 2 to 3 years younger than me. If you can imagine some slow, trouble-making kid who never did their homework and was older than the other kids because they'd repeated twice, that was me.

My sister, on the other hand, had beautiful handwriting in Chinese and was 2 grades ahead of me, even though we'd finished the same class at the previous school. She responded much better to that teacher-centric learning. When she was in China last year and was thinking about doing some tutoring work with children she asked me how she should do it. She said, 'Do I just read aloud from a book and ask them to repeat after me?' That's when I knew she really got the Chinese gene and I didn't.

I really find language-learning Chinese style extremely burdensome. Instead of being interactive and integrative, the teachers just employ endless rote learning, repetition and memorisation. If we'd had texts on real life dialogues, real life vocabulary and emulated doing things from real life (e.g. writing a letter, making up dialogues with a partner) I wouldn't have been such a pain about going to Chinese school, and I imagine hundreds if not thousands of Chinese background kids wouldn't be subjected to the same torture! For example, we had a text on Mulan. This was way before the Disney movie came out. We could've written dialogues about Mulan talking to her father, or the other soldiers in the army or whatever. Armed with an English-Chinese dictionary I'm sure we could've had real fun with it. But alas, that would've been way too creative.

Learning Chinese later at uni was such a treat compared to that. I think they should get the uni lecturers in Chinese to give those volunteers at Chinese schools a crash course in 'not torturing poor kids and making them hate Chinese school'!